Chris' Soundtrack Corner presents the soundtrack of KEOMA, featuring a unique and pervasive score by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis. These prolific musical brothers are well known for their predominantly song-based approach to scoring Italian films. With their background in popular music, it's no surprise that their film scoring approach is primarily based on tuneful, pop-rock vocal and instrumental music.

The brothers scored ten films for director Enzo G. Castellari from 1972 through 1985, ranging from Westerns to crime thrillers, action films to horror and science fiction. Castellari's 1976 Western KEOMA (aka THE VIOLENT BREED, KEOMA THE AVENGER, DJANGO RIDES AGAIN, DJANGO'S GREAT RETURN and the like) is largely considered the best film they did together. Coming very late in the Italian or "Spaghetti" Western phase, the genre couldn't have had a better closing statement than KEOMA, which offers a renewed approach with a unique audiovisual resonance that was every bit as striking as some of the first Italian Westerns that made international audiences stand up and pay attention.

When Castellari was editing the film, before bringing in the De Angelis brothers, he was listening to music by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, whose songs influenced the rhythm of his editing of the movie. So he instructed the De Angelis's to write a song-score with songs in the style of Cohen and Dylan. The half dozen or so "chapters" of the "Keoma" song serve as a Greek Chorus lending words to the gunfighter's silent actions throughout the film, or at least letting loose the raging voices of cynicism roiling about in his head. The mix of songs and instrumental score is striking and effectual in giving the drama a unique vocal texture that accentuates what we're seeing, highlighting the pain, revulsion, and disillusionment heard within those gruff and pained voices as they embody the unspoken angst of Keoma as he faces down his final adversary in the dark, sullied town of his birth.

Castellari's 1979 film IL CACCIATORE DI SQUALI (The Hunter of Sharks; aka THE SHARK HUNTER, GUARDIANS OF THE DEEP, and even DJANGO AND THE SHARKS) is a far more trivial potboiler than KEOMA, but it's an entertaining enough picture for the undemanding viewer. The De Angelis Brothers provided a tuneful score for this post-JAWS adventure drama about treasure hunters daring shark-infested waters to dive for sunken wealth. The score conveys a dreamy vibe that fits the warm landscapes and clear, sun-dappled waters, and the dangerous underwater ambiences involving competing treasure hunters and sharks alike.

While not every alternate vocal version of the songs have been included in this release, this album does contain the entire instrumental score from KEOMA, as well as the essential elements of the score for IL CACCIATORE DI SQUALI, both freshly remastered from their original soundtrack recordings.